In his seminal work, Play of Man, (click on the link to download a free copy) written in 1901, Karl Groos proposed that there are certain universal types of play which all children engage in and which help children to grow into fully functioning and effective human beings. Groos argued that whilst the exact form of the play is impacted by the culture around the child the categories of play cross cultures. So for example whilst play fighting occurs in all cultures playful sword fighting only occurs in cultures familiar with swords.These categories of play are:

Physical Play

Language Play

Exploratory Play

Constructive Play

Fantasy Play

Social Play

These types of play do not exist in isolation and as Peter Gray points out in his thought provoking book Free to Learn " A lively outdoor group game may be physical play, language play, exploratory play, constructive play, fantasy play, and social play all at once." Gray goes on to make a definition of what play is and defines it in five ways:

Play is self chosen and self directed

Play is an activity in which means are more valued than ends

Play has structure or rules that are not dictated by physical necessity but emanate from the minds of players

Play is imaginative

Play involves an active alert, but non-stressed frame of mindWhat leaps out to me about this list is that if we replaced the word play with learning virtually all educators I know would agree whole heatedly that this was a wonderful list of what we seek to achieve in our classrooms.

Why is it then that so many schools are unable to build upon the natural playfulness of children and too often learning becomes:

Entirely teacher directed

Valued only as a means to achieve a grade or other external reward

Has a structure and rules emanating from the minds of the teachers rather than the students

Lacks imagination

Involves passive students in a stressed frame of mind

I would not go as far as Gray does in his book in rejecting notions of traditional schooling, and would question whether the success he attributes to the alternative schooling system at Sudbury Valley, is not, in part, due to the Cultural Capital that the parents and students who go there possess. I do however feel that all educators need to look reflectively at how we can promote a playful state of mind in our students. Why is it that so many students and adults alike view learning not as play but as work.I would argue that often the reason we are unable to achieve this is that, whilst intellectually we may agree, on a core level many people do not accept Vygotsky's argument that , “A child’s greatest achievements are possible in play, achievements that tomorrow will become her basic level of real action.” As adults we have to resist our impulses to intervene too early and allow children time to explore and play with ideas. Whilst observing closely and being supportive we need to trust that given this freedom children will push themselves to the limit of their ability. Too often this lack of trust is obvious in the place where free play should be the most valued, the playground. In particular teachers concern about rough and tumble play where,"the roughness of play is perceived by teachers and playground supervisors as potential problems. However, the potential benefits, such as conflict resolution training and motor skills training, are overlooked by many teachers." (On the Child’s Right to Play Fight), means that even in the playground play is heavily regulated.Once in the classroom the time and space to play with objects and ideas is often limited or closely prescribed leaving students to feel that learning is something that is done to them not something they do.Don't get me wrong I am not arguing that teachers should not have a clear idea of where they will take student learning (see my previous postFour implications of structured inquiry). What I am arguing is that learning can be done most effectively if teachers have the confidence to give the students increased ownership over their learning and time to play with ideas without fear of the final product being 'wrong'. In this way students will be empowered to go above and beyond the intended learning of the teacher and really reach their maximum level of achievement.Whilst important things like high stakes external exams do place limitations on how far this can be achieved, hopefully the playful mindedness questions below will help you reflect upon this in your classroom, whatever age of student you teach.I'd love to hear back from you whether they have enabled you to move learning in a more playful direction or whether you have other questions to provoke playful learning.

How do I let my students know that I have confidence in them as self motivated learners?

How much choice do your students have about how and what they learn?

Is the learning space your classroom or the students classroom?

How much input do students have in setting up the rules and norms of the classroom?

Is there time and space for students to 'play' with objects or ideas?

How is it clear that imagination and creativity is valued?

Which word do I use most in class 'play' or 'work'?

If we could all make our classrooms a little more playful I think we can move closer to having the happy motivated learners we all desire.

As far back as the Ancient Greeks Heraclitus of Ephesus was teaching that 'Change alone is unchanging.' Education is certainly a field in which barely a week seems to go past without talk of change. Too often this talk is accompanied by talk of what is 'failing' or 'wrong' in our current educational systems.Michael Fullan, who has written expansively about educational change and how to manage it ,notes at the start of Leading in a Culture of Change "Change is a double edged sword... for better of worse,change arouses emotions"We all have personal experience of a number of these emotions either as a reluctant recipient of change, an active and excited participant in change, as someone trying to introduce change into a school or maybe even as someone trying to resit a change we disagreed with.

Many of these very common emotions towards change are less than positive.

Key of these are:

Change is uncomfortable: We are being asked to do something new and that always contains a risk of failure as well as the excitement of potential success.

Change increase our feeling of isolation: There is always a tendency for people to feel that they are alone in going through a change process

We view change as losing something:Dylan Wiliam makes the point that in order to effectively make a change you need to identify what we will be spending less time on to make room for the change.

We naturally want to revert to our old ways:Interestingly research (e.g. the work of Lilian G. Katz and James Raths)indicates that the majority of teachers in stressful situations revert to how they themelves were taught at school.

The vast majority of professionals in education are doing a good job and have a passionate desire to do an even better one. How then can we think about educational change in a way that acknowledges what has gone before and allows people to achieve the growth they desire without being overwhelmed by the negative emotions that change can generate? I am currently reading the excellent Appreciative Inquiry Handbook:For Leaders of Change. The ideas behind Appreciative Inquiry are clearly summarised in the video by John Hayes below. Simply put it is to focus on what is going well, work out why that is going so well and to spread that into improving other areas that may need changing. This breaks down into a 4 step cycle known as the 4D Cycle:

Discover what is going well and why

Dream what might be

Design how we can make our dream happen

Delivery of the dream (this phase is also sometimes called Destiny)

This seems to me a far more positive way of viewing change but I wonder whether the use of the word change itself is not still a stumbling block?

Imagine someone asks you how you are going to change. The likelihood is that you would view this to some extent as an indictment or a devaluing on what you were doing before.

Imagine now if someone asked how you would like to develop, grow, progress or learn. Might your response be more likely to be open and positive? This links with the 3 key feedback questions proposed by John Hattie in Visible Learning (p37):"Enhancing learning also needs school leaders and teachers who can create school, staffroom and classroom environments where teachers can talk about their teaching, where errors and difficulties are seen as critical learning opportunities.... where teachers can feel safe to learn, re-learn and explore their own teaching knowledge and understanding. Teachers need to be openly able to discuss the 3 key feedback questions:"Where are they going?' 'How are they going?" and Where to next?" (The 'they' refers to both the teacher and to the student)."Education is such a complex field that no one will ever master it. Its complexities are what makes teaching such an exciting and rewarding profession. Let's acknowledge this complexity by asking of ourselves that we continually grow and learn. Everyone involved in the profession should be able to honestly reflect upon what they are doing so that they can enable ever better learning for their students.

As we ask ourselves 'How can we make what worked well work even better in the future?' profound educational change will occur, not as a frightening end imposed from outside, but as a natural result of educators intrinsic desire to grow and learn.To end where I began, with a quote from Heraclitus of Ephesus,"Everything flows, nothing stands still." If we begin to think of change as unbroken flow from where we have been through where we are and onto the future we envision, we may find it less threatening than the broken and disjointed image of progress that word change too often conjures up.

At this point of the northern hemisphere school year many teachers are busily engaged in report writing (brilliantly described by a colleague of mine as 'the part of teaching we get paid for... everything else is fun'). Parents and students are awaiting nervously the output of those teachers endeavours. Too often however the result of all of this work and tension is minimal in terms of student learning. In fact one would have very little difficulty in making an argument that the net results of reports is negative both in terms of the amount of time in takes the teacher away from other work and the over fixation on the report grade, at the expense of listening to feedback, by parents and students.To attempt to address some of these issues we overhauled our reports last year to try to emphasis reporting forward rather than backwards. (A sample report, minus cover page, formatting etc, can be found in the resources section) The aim being for the report to provide a route forward for the student rather than closure on the period gone. In doing so it was hopped that teachers could use the report writing as more integrated into their planned teaching and learning for the students.As with all initiatives we have been, I'm sure, only partially successful, however, I thought people might be interested in some of the thought processes we went through as they go through their own quest for the perfect report card:1) What's the point of a report card?Whilst the written report is just one part of the reporting process alongside regular feedback, 3 way and student led conferences, it has an important role to play and an inflated importance in the eyes of many parents and students.One of the reasons why report cards are so hard to design is that they serve such a multitude of purposes:

A legal record of attendance and performance during the reporting period.

Information for parents as to their child's progress and current/future learning needs.

Information for students as to their own progress and current/future learning needs.

Information for future teachers and schools as to a students progress and current/ future learning needs.

To enable the parents, student and teacher to work in an informed partnership to move the students learning forward.

Often in trying to do all of these things reports end up doing none of them overly well. We therefore made the clear choice that the primary purpose of the reports was to move the students learning forward, not simply to say what they have done. In fulfilling this primary purpose we felt that the others would also be met.2) How do we make the focus of Learning Goals and how they can be achieved?In order to use reports to move students forward we decided to have a box for each subject area which described the students Learning Goal and the strategies to achieve this. We decided to limit this to one goal per subject area to ensure that it was focused on the really key thing that mattered for a particular student. One key decision we made was that goals would follow through from the second semester report onto the first report of the following academic year meaning that new teachers would need to be aware of the previous years report.Following the reports many teachers had students have their learning goals clearly displayed and frequently had students reflect upon them thus linking the reporting process more closely with the learning process.It was particularly interesting the feedback from some teachers about how having learning goals had really made them think about where to take the high achieving students next.By attaching strategies to the learning goals we tried to ensure that there was a clear commitment as to how both school and home can help a student to reach their goals.In addition to the goals and strategies students receive a narrative comment to explain the choice of goals. The nature of this comment linked to our third question.3) How do we make the feedback in the report consistent with types of feedback students receive in class?We know from Hattie,Wiliam and others that feedback is one of the most important drivers of student learning. How do we ensure that the quality of feedback in the report is equal to that given in class. To this end the following instructions were given to teachers in regards to feedback on reports:Your comment should include 3 elements:1. Progress made towards previous goals (if there are goals) if not general progress.2. The student’s work during this reporting period.3. The observations that have led to the learning goal.

Try to ensure your comment fulfils these criteria for effective feedback• Timely: Make sure you are commenting on things the student has done in a way that the student can use when they next encounter the task or apply that skill to a new task.• Descriptive of the work: Make sure that the comments are descriptive of work or observed behaviours not of the student’s personality. It focuses on one or more strengths of the work and provides at least one suggestion for a next step. Be particularly careful to avoid words that imply fixed ability e.g. intelligent, clever, talented, potential, smart, quick, nice, etc.• Positive: Show how learning is a journey forward, and it is honest about both strengths to build on and weaknesses to improve. Its tone makes clear that the student is an active participant in their own learning. Being positive should not be confused with giving praise. Be positive but avoid giving praise.eg; X made good use of adjectives to provide detail about a character (Positive)

X is a good writer (Praise)

• Clear and Specific: It is clear enough that the student knows what to do next.

• Differentiated: Meets the needs of the student with respect to their current work and where they need to go during the next semester.

4) To Grade or not to Grade?This is perhaps the hardest decision to make. Whilst as educators we are aware that having grades distracts from the feedback as parents we also know that we want to know is our child in the normal range? Additionally at NIS we have a very high non English speaking parent population so we wanted to ensure could have an easy overview on the report. We thus decided to go for a colour coded grid for each subject saying whether a student was:R= Rarely Meeting SLO: Your child is rarely or never meeting grade level expectations.S= Sometimes Meeting SLO: Although your child sometimes meets grade level expectations, they do not do so consistently in all aspects oflearning that make up that grade. A student who requires significant teacher support to consistently meet the learning outcomes will receivealso an S.M= Meeting SLO: Your child is consistently working at the level expected of a student in their grade level.E= Exceeding SLO: Your child is one of a few students who are consistently exceeding the level expected of a student in their gradeAs our reports are electronic we are able to hyper link directly to the schools scope and sequence documents so parents can see what those expectations are if they wish.

Can reporting ever be part of the learning process?To answer the question I set at the start of the blog. I think we moved some way to make reporting part of the learning process with our review of the reports. There are however many things still to do and the search for the perfect report card is something that will keep teachers busy and blogging for many years to come.

The publicity for the Hour of Code December 9th -15th has made me think about the role that coding has in schools of moving the relationship we expect students to have with technology in education from students being consumers of content to students being creators of content. It has also got me, as a child of the 70's and early 80's and a teacher from 1990 onwards, reflecting on how the pendulum swings in education. My first experiences of computers at school in about 1982 involved binary programming, punch cards and making something, possibly, move on the screen after a few hours. I have to admit that as a student, unlike some of my friends, I found this less than inspiring.When I began my teaching career things had moved on a little and we were using LOGO in class to try to get a Valiant Turtle to move along the ground which it did about 25% of the time before running out of power. For a long while LOGO commands were included in Mathematics curriculum in the UK and examples of good LOGO activities can be found on sites like nrich . However LOGO tended to be taught in a compartmentalised way rather than exploring the transdisciplinary potential of coding. More recently coding seems to have faded into the background as it has been assumed that it is no longer needed as it has become less important to understand how devices work in order to use them. So then we come to the present time when the pendulum looks to be moving back in the direction of coding being viewed as important again. Why should this be and what are the benefits?If we are to accept Alan Kay's definition that "Technology is anything invented after you were born",then Smart Phones are not technology for our Kindergärtners, tablets are not technology for our Pre K's and laptop computers and the internet do not count as technology for any student still in school. This is something anyone still proudly talking about a C21st education and C21st skills should bear in mind. The question then arises how do we use the ubiquitous tools of the late 20th and early 21st centuries most effectively to aid student thinking? One key use of the tools I would propose is to enable them to become tools of creation for students as opposed to tools of consumption. In order for this to happen effectively coding plays a key role in empowering students. Unlike my school day struggles with BASIC and punch cards, Scratch and similar programmes allow students to drag and drop blocks of code to quickly and simply achieve a motivating level of success. Sites like learn.code.org allow teachers and students to pick up the basics quickly. What is required is a commitment by schools to ensuring that coding is viewed as a C21st literacy and an empowering of students to become creative and skilled users of that literacy across all curriculum areas. In doing so we will unleash the power of the tools all students take for granted and place the ability to be truly creative in the hands of all of our students.

Bill Lucas and Guy Claxton in their excellent book New Kinds of Smart make the point that a common misconception about intelligence is that 'The mind and body are separate and truly intelligent activity is located in the mind.' Lucas and Claxton point out that our emerging knowledge about embodied cognition shows that the physical and the cognitive are deeply entwined.They conclude that, "It would be great if that deep coalition of the physical and the cognitive were to inform the curriculum in more schools.'As I wrote in my previous blog post, Design for Life (see below) this desire to ensure that students have ample opportunities to learn with their hands was one of the moving principles behind implementing a Kindergarten to Grade 5 Design course here at Nanjing International School.As the Design element of the curriculum has developed I've been inquiring more into the Maker Movement and Design Thinking and recently came across an amazing book Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering the Classroom by Sylvia Libow Martinez and Gary S. Stager, Ph.D. in addition to a great deal of practical advice, this book clearly outlines the potential of Making as a central aspect of the learning process but is also clear about some of the potential pitfalls. I would highly recommend that people get hold of a copy as it makes a very clear case for the importance of designing and making things both physically and on computers whilst addressing some of the concerns.As I tinker with my own understanding of the potential of design thinking and making in the classroom number of potential pitfalls seem to need to be addressed:1) Empty Creativity: Matthew Crawford in The Case for Working with your Hands (published in the US as Shop Class as Soulcraft) makes the point that Einstein was not a creative physicist in isolation from being a highly knowledgeable one. "Creativity" Crawford argues "is the by product of mastery of the sort that is cultivated through long practice." (p51). As we empower students to to come up with creative solutions and creative problems how do we also ensure that they are becoming skilled at using the tools, both physical and mental, they need to solve that problems. Unless carefully structured we run the dangour of creating a group of frustrated students who know that if they'd ever learnt to programme or to solder or to saw they would be able to solve something. Even more worryingly creating students who are not frustrated by this and feel the goal is to talk about what you would do if you ever learnt any skills. How do we ensure that there is the necessary rigour so that creating something is not the end. Creating and building something that genuinely works should be the goal.2) Abdication of responsibility by teachers: One common pitfall of inquiry based teaching is hearing teachers say "I don't need to know it the children can find it out." Whilst for certain specific knowledge this is true, Martinez and Stager are very clear on this point; "In case we have been to subtle, you should learn to program,solder,build a robot or design a 3D object,especially if you expect children to." Teachers do not need to become expert in all fields of making but they need to have the curiosity to learn slightly ahead of their students.3) Learning the Design Cycle becoming more important than Designing: How do we avoid the importance becoming knowing the phases of the design cycle over and above being able to design.This is the flip side to point 2 how do we ensure that teachers don't become overly prescriptive and make design thinking about an abstract thinking process rather than physical designing and building. 4) Students not thinking deeply about making: The Agency by Design projectis trying to link the Project Zero Work on thinking with the Maker movement and talk about giving students agency to have the knowledge skills and understandings to design effectively. Martinez and Stager argue that "Making is a way of documenting the thinking of a learner in a shareable artefact." How will teachers become skilled at understanding and enabling the thinking process of a student engaged in making and tinkering?I am excited by the potential for a truly rounded learning experience that Design Thinking and the Maker Movement offers but wary that without great teachers and great teacher training it may well not live up to that potential.

Part of the mission at Nanjing International School is to inspire international mindedness. Having been involved in international education for over 20 years international mindedness is something I have devoted much time to promoting. It is also an incredibly elusive term to pin down. Many people will be familiar with E.Hall's Cultural Iceberg Model of Culture (see image) which uses the analogy of the iceberg to explain that culture is a mixture of the external part of culture that is easily visible at the tip of the iceberg, such as clothes, arts, food etc and the internal which is invisible and far larger, values, thought patterns etc.

Equally the works of Geert Hofstede summarised in the You Tube video below are familiar to many as he defines 6 criteria in which he feels cultures differ. These being: 1) How they handle inequality (Power Distance) 2) Dealing with the unknown (Uncertainty avoidance) 3) Dependence on others (Individualism v Collectivism) 4) Gender roles (Masculinity v Femininity) 5) Time perspective (Long to Short term orientation) 6) Dealing with natural drives (Indulgence v Restraint)

The International Baccalaureate Organization in developing its Learner Profile came up with a list of 10 characteristics that they feel represent an internationally minded person. However in the recent review of the Learner Profile (IB learner profile review April 2013) showed that 24% of respondents felt that it was less effective in achieving this ambitious goal.Given this complexity in understanding cultures what are we actually demanding of ourselves and hoping to inspire in our students when we aim to be internationally minded? How do we ensure that we avoid the pitfalls of only viewing the tip of the iceberg of culture or of viewing international mindedness an alternative term for moral relativism?Perhaps a more useful approach is to accept that international mindedness is hard to define but that it is something we know when we see it. I'll therefore kick off with a few answers of my own to the statement : I know I'm being internationally minded when.. and hopefully people will use the comments option to add their own. together I'm sure we can can come up with a fascinating list reflecting the internationally diverse selection of people who read this blog.I know I'm being internationally minded when...I actively listen to the ideas of others.I feel slightly uncomfortable with the actions of others and want to understand why I feel uncomfortable.I question whether a viewpoint I hold is culturally specific.I am open to exploring new ways of doing thingsI try to communicate across language barriersI accept that people will view my actions differently depending on their cultural backgroundsI seek to understand the point of view of others even though I may ultimately end up disagreeing with itI realise how little I know at am excited by how much chance I still have to learn

One of the most important shifts in language that has taken place in my years of teaching is the movement from talking about teaching to using the term 'teaching and learning' up to the present day when we talk about 'learning and teaching'. By placing the learning first in this phrase we are making an important distinction. As John Hattie says in Visible Learning for Teachers,"learning occurs when learning is the explicit and transparent goal." I am sure that all of us if we are honest will admit that there have been occasions in our teaching career when the learning was relegated as the goal behind other issues such as curriculum coverage, producing a product for a deadline or simply containing a lively class on a wet November afternoon. Too often as well teacher appraisal focuses on teaching with little reference to student learning.I therefore propose four steps that need to be thought about to ensure that lessons focus on student learning.Step one: of ensuring that learning is constantly the focus of the teacher is for the teacher to always be asking themselves what are students learning here? This vitally important question reflects something that my colleague Marina Gijzen said to me when I told her the title of this blog post, "the teaching might be irrelevant but the teacher is not."Step two: Teachers need to have a mindset that enables them to adapt their pedagogy in the light of the evidence that they are constantly gathering about student learning. If a student is not developing the desired skills and knowledge when it is delivered in a particular way, the chances are that delivering it in exactly the same way on countless occasions will have no better impact. Of course, if we don't know what the desired learning is, it is hard to assess if it is occurring leading to: Step three: There should be clarity for both students and teachers about what the expected learning is. The dialogue within the classroom should be about "what we are learning" not "what we are doing". All too often students (and indeed sometimes teachers) have great clarity about what they are doing- the page of a mathematics book, building a tower, writing a story etc. but little idea about what they are learning. Unless students are explicitly aware of what they are learning, they are unlikely to retain and transfer that knowledge to new situations.Step four:When it comes to learning, less is often more. Curriculum needs to be based around key learning outcomes that are generative in nature in that allow students to develop more and deeper knowledge from them. The Teaching for Understanding movement coming out of Project Zero at Harvard has been influential in espousing this. By ensuring that clearly articulated and appropriately challenging learning is the focus for every student in every classroom we can ensure that, to contradict my own title, teaching remains highly relevant as a means to achieving student learning. Teaching disassociated from learning is a dangerous irrelevance.

As I embark on my last academic year in my current post and seek a new professional challenge for this time next year, I have been thinking a lot about school culture and how generative school cultures are created and maintained. How do we ensure that changes of personnel have a positive impact upon a school culture, evolving the school ever more effectively towards achieving its core values?A key aspect of answering this question is in the final part phrase of the question itself. Does a school have a clear vision of what its core values are? As Wiggins and McTighe commented in their 2007 book Schooling by Design "the academic leader's job is to ensure that the culture of the school is mission focused." Michael Fullan is also a highly influential writer in this area.In my experience whilst many schools are actively committed to their mission statements there are still far too many schools in which the mission is simply something that hangs on the wall rather than a driving force of day to day learning.To coin a phrase is it often something that is laminated rather than lived.It seems to me that there are number of factors that need to be in place to ensure that school cultures are generative to allow new members of a school's community to add to the school's culture and legacy rather than constantly trying to alter it.1) An agreed and clearly articulated view of what the school is trying to achieve. What qualities will students be developing in the school for the school to say that it is being successful for that student? In addition to the school's mission in IB schools the Learner Profile is an important central pillar of this discussion (see the Learner Profile Goal setting in the resource section)2) Clearly articulated and easily accessible curriculum documents which embed the values of the school into the day to day learning3) A core of shared pedagogy which are part of every teacher's practice.4) Clear communications systems so that new members of a school community can rapidly understand the values of the school5) A focus on the collaborative nature of school culture.6) The importance of extra curricular activities, fun days, links with local charities etc to develop the school's traditions and sense of continuity.I am interested to know what others would add (or may even subtract) from this list to ensure that everyone coming in new to a school is able to add to its legacy constantly improving student learning whilst avoiding the pit fall of rapid (and in many cases frequent) changes in direction. All to easily these rapid changes can lead to schools being trapped for years in a permanent implementation dip.By the way if you would like to evolve Nanjing International School, the Head of Primary job is now advertised of the school's website. If you are interested in leadership within a school that embodies the type of education I write about in this blog I would strongly encourage you to apply before 25 September 2013.

Education over the years has been rife with false dichotomies and good pedagogical ideas which have hardened into unhelpful dogmas. As a teacher who is committed to the goals of inquiry based education it is my fervent hope that inquiry based teaching does not fall into this pattern. This is a point Kath Murdoch has made on her excellent blog post ‘Busting some myths about the inquiry cycle, when she stated,“I have seen slavish adherence to a cycle actually impede rather than enhance inquiry.”As practitioners of inquiry based pedagogy it is important that we practice the open minded and critical thinking skills we believe are vital for our students to develop when assessing our own pedagogical practice and beliefs. This is particularly true when evaluating when is the best time to provide direct teaching so that students can acquire the skills and knowledge that they require in order to inquire effectively and when students need time to inquire independently in order to refine understanding and pose new problems. It is the movement (often many times during the course of a lesson) of the teacher between being instructor, facilitator, critical friend or active observer that makes the inquiry classroom such a rich and complex learning environment. It is vital that as teachers committed to producing students who will become empowered adults, we do not fall into the trap of thinking that one of these roles is 'superior' to another. It is even more important still that we do not fall into the dogmatic trap of viewing direct teaching as a bad thing. As Hattie has pointed out in his construction of Visible Learning from his meta-analysis of over 800 research papers; “ The model of visible teaching and learning combines, rather than contrasts,teacher-centered and student-centered learning and knowing.” (Visible Learning p26)As with all teaching the pedagogical strategy is not the end in itself it is the tool to achieve the desired end. For us as inquiry based teachers this end is to develop individuals who have a rich range of knowledge, skills and understandings so they can encounter the unknown with confidence and enthusiasm. Adults who are not merely effective problem solvers but also insightful problem posers. Teaching is both an art and a science and the most effective teachers are the ones who have the broadest paint palette and the largest tool box to use to create an effective learning environment. It is important that as inquiry based teachers we do not limit ourselves by dogma. Instead, like our students, we should be constantly excited by new knowledge and skills from across pedagogical traditions and ask how can creatively use them to achieve the challenging goals we have for our students.

In previous blogs I've spoken about bringing in Tech innovations and the difficulties in making them transformative. However the most perhaps the most effective and revolutionary classroom innovation I have seen introduced in the past few years is that of 'No Hands Up'. Coming out of Dylan Wiliam and Paul Black's work on Assessment for Learning this simple yet powerful strategy resets the balance of the classroom. Students are selected at random by their names being drawn to answer teacher questions (we use lollipop sticks for this). Every student knows that they may be called upon to engage with learning at any time. Further more it ensures that classrooms are not dominated by the few who normally answer all the questions. This has a powerful impact upon all students who start to perceive that everyone as having a valid voice in learning. As this opening up of engagement in the classroom occurs it allows for all students to view themselves as learners and develop what Carol Dweck refers to as a Growth Mindset.Further more the approach forces teachers to assess the purpose and types of questioning they are asking. Closed knowledge based questions are far less effective in this scenario than deeper open questioning. If your purpose in asking a question is to elicit whether all members of the class (and not just the 2 or 3 who always answer) have aquired a particular piece of knowledge, then having them write the answer on mini white boards and hold them up, is a far more effective method.As Dylan Wiliam has written in an article How to ask better QuestionsIt has been estimated that in an average career a teacher will ask over a million questions, the vast majority of which they know the answer to!Far too many of these are lower order questions which simply require factual recall. These kind of questions may keep pupils awake but they do not help them to learn anything new.Teachers need to ask fewer but better questions. The introduction of 'No Hands Up' into classrooms not only involves all students but makes teachers analyse their own questioning techniques. An increase of wait time occurs as questions that require thinking become more prevalent. In addition more authentic questions tend to be asked where the teacher genuinly wants to know the answer rather than is seeking validation that someone in the class has listened to what they said.Whilst introducing No Hands Up is not without difficulties or teething problems as both teachers and students (particularly students who are used to being the ones who answer all the questions) adapt, it is a vital component in developing a thinking classroom for all learners.Those of you who have done it for years I would love to hear your comments and experiences and for those of you who haven't tried it yet I would encourage you to do so and I would love to hear about you experiences.

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AuthorMy name is Derek Pinchbeck. I am the Learning and Teaching Adviser for English Schools Foundation in Hong Kong. For the last 25 years I have been teaching in International Schools around the World. During my teaching career I have been fascinated by the question "How do we get students to think and create with what they know?" This blog is a collection of some of my thoughts as I strive to answer that question.